Go Green! Go White!

Yoo hoo! I’m pretty excited to share this lil’ creation with you guys… It’s my first mini cake ever! And I really liked how it turned out. This mini cake was made for my favorite Michigan State alum, Matt, who is faithful to Spartan football and has an equal love for Snoopy. These two favorites, plus the fact that it’s football season, lent to some inspiration for this project.

When I think about Peanuts, I immediately imagine his little red doghouse and all of the characters Snoopy takes on when he’s hanging out with Woodstock. You know, he’ll have his typewriter, he has his famous pilot outfit, and of course Joe Cool. Since Snoopy’s such a charismatic actor with a chameleon-like aptitude for assuming different roles, I decided to pop on a Spartan helmet and let him enjoy being part of the Big 10 conference for the day.

Let’s get started with the construction:

Here’s what will be the dog house- 3 layers of chocolate fudge cake, filled with chocolate ganache, and then covered in buttercream. I put fondant over this, then painted it red using vodka and food coloring as my medium. (Picture further down).

I wanted to go for a 2-D, more cartoony and comic strip look for part of this, so instead of molding the dog house, I just cut out two flat pieces of gum paste and painted them red (same technique as above).

One of my newest investments was a package of 10 edible ink markers! This made my life so much easier when it came down to details like the lines on the side of the dog house. Paintiing these would have been a nightmare.

Here’s the painted, fondanted dog house base, atop a cardboard circle covered in green fondant, serving as the grass.

Now for the main characters 🙂 Here are the starting forms of Snoopy and Woodstock. Snoopy is made of gumpaste, and Woodstock is made of yellow fondant.

So I referenced many photos of Sparty and Snoopy to figure out how to do an accurate Spartan helmet. (See photo of Sparty below) Here’s Snoopy’s head with a little green helmet and the start of the white part (what’s the official name for it?)

Below I added the face shields and the helmet mask.

I had added ridges to the white part of the helmet using a paring knife, but they didn’t really show up on just the plain white gum paste. So I painted over it with a little silver edible glitter to highlight the dimensions of the ridges.

Finishing touches? Woodstock got some eyes and a fondant football. Snoopy got a face, ears, and limbs. We can’t forget the little black pads on the bottom of his feet!

Here they are, placed atop the house, and a little green S emblem at the bottom.